In praise of ugly towns

   People of Britain's "ugly towns". You are so lucky. You live in a country that has not "cleaned up" every inch of its architecture. Something of the grime remains, and perhaps that grime is necessary for the time being rather than being replaced with yet another banal shopping centre. Try visiting towns such as Retford or Warrington or little Welsh places that are "almost" towns such as Flint or Shotton. There is often a quiet contemplative joy to be had walking around those streets after the shops have closed, sitting on a municipal park bench, staring at a peeling brick wall and eating chips next to an un-emptied litter bin. If nothing else, it's an exercise in resilience.

   In my experience, slick and well-presented towns such as Chester or Harrogate often attract a certain "surface" mentality, which may look good, but often loses as much as it gains. By contrast, these slightly grubby corners of our land attract the ne'er do wells, but also people who really don't care - people who like to go where there's a challenge to be met, and people who like to buy a house for £10,000 less than they might have paid elsewhere.

   And there's another reason to live in "muck". If you're a political activist, radical artist, sexual revolutionary or anything of that nature, the authorities might well be too busy focusing on REAL "anti-social behaviour" to bother about you. One of the safest places I ever stayed the night - or so I felt - was in a so-called "crime hotspot". And guess what. It had some of the most beautiful streets I have ever walked on. This, I suspect, is the lesson that residents of Soho or Harlem learned long ago, and indeed the lesson Berliners know more than anyone else. "Clean up" an area too much, and all of the bourgeois net-curtain twitchers start filming you on their digital cameras.

  I can honestly say, at the risk of sounding pretentious, that I used to say to my wealthier associates from the South, "Oh, you really must see this lovely little place I've found! It is an absolute delight! And the chip shop is worth the effort alone!".

  So yes, my views have changed. Like most people of my "aspiring" and "respectable" lower class, I suppose I was as guilty as anyone of making certain assumptions about Dirty Britain. But scratch the surface of Clean Britain and all of the nasty middle-class prejudices and conformities come tumbling out - and suddenly, it doesn't look quite so rosy. Best live in filth where ugly people get up to all sorts and reproduce carelessly than in the well-scrubbed corners of our islands where pampered girls in designer ripped jeans take offence at the slightest deviation from their pretend-punk conservatism, mock-Essex "student" accents and fake-punk hairdos. Yes, there may be ridiculous tattoos and burger-smells and a morbid fear of non-existent terrorists and molesters, but if you are prepared to hold your nose above that, you will find places to feel at peace and feel supported - and sometimes far more so than in a beautiful but downright sinister "tourist town". You will also find busy fat people with eleven children who say "They ain't doing any harm. Leave them alone.", rather than people who have the time or the inclination to compile dossiers on you (complete with photos) and dispatch them to the local authority.

   People make their choice of home for very unexpected reasons, and when we meet such people, who amongst us hasn't had a "Who've have thought it?" moment. There are, and always have been, middle-class neighbours in some of the most run-down working-class streets. We should welcome these "class asylum-seekers" who find petit-bourgeois Jewish values ridiculous, and not be suspicious of them, or think they are mocking every single proletarian in existence. Their "snobbery" - if it can be called that, is the type of snobbery that comes from bitter experience of middle-class hatred, and a rather dogged belief that their power and influence can help make a difference to workers' lives. Admittedly, their notion of workers is somewhat more aesthetically idealistic (in the D.H Lawrence mould), but then, that is perhaps something the working class as a whole has failed to grasp - the need to present itself better instead of assuming that the arguments alone would carry the day.